


Adhoore

by AkelaKela



Series: Bollywood One-Shots [1]
Category: Bollywood Movies, Kaminey (2009), Kaminey | Scoundrels (2009)
Genre: Bollywood, Bollywood Film, Bollywood Movie, Gen, Kaminey (2009) - Freeform, Priyanka Chopra - Freeform, Shahid Kapoor - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-07 12:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11623611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AkelaKela/pseuds/AkelaKela
Summary: Charlie and Guddu during the years they spent apart.





	Adhoore

Charlie was different.

Guddu was different.

They might have looked exactly the same on the outside, but Sweety knew Guddu inside and out.

His smiles were wide, grinning and starry. Every time he smiled, it was like he was a kid again. When his lips split over his uneven teeth and the the innocent light in his eyes glowed brighter.

She tipped two of her fingers under his chin and gently closed his mouth. He looked adorable. His hair fell back, away from his upturned face and his eyes had fluttered shut long ago. The sheets were thrown carelessly of his naked lower half and a sleepy, lip-curling smile was set in the soft features of his sweet face.

His wife let his smile pull the corners of her own mouth up and she nuzzled against his neck hugging him gently.

Sweety wondered how Charlie would look if he smiled. Were his teeth like his brother's too? How did his eyes light up when he let his face open up?

But Sweety had never seen that.

Because Charlie never smiled.

Not really.

When his mouth opened and his lips pulled back, it was either a snarl or one of his scornful, acerbic grimaces. 

Guddu smiled.

But he talked like his brother. Almost never. Maybe less.

_When Guddu was seventeen, he went to school._

_"Pardhai nahi kiya?"_

_("You didn't study?")_

_The teacher slapped the graded test paper down on Guddu's desk. The red markered numbers were circled viciously._

"Huh?" The woman's free hand was rested on her massive, cocked hip.

_"P-p-p-ardha-i-i k-k-kiya Ma'a-a-am."_

_("I s-s-s-tudie-e-e-d Ma'a-a-am.")_

_He felt red blush spreading up his cheeks rise to his ears. A few obnoxious titters reached his ears from the back of the class._

_"Bolne nahi aate?"_

_("Don't you know how to talk?")_

_Her stare was cold, steely and unforgiving. She was determined to make him pay. And in front of everyone._

_Guddu clammed up. He didn't even bother opening his mouth and trying to force the butchered words past his lips._

_The stained wood of the desk was bleached away in places and there were ball-point pen words scratched into the glossy surface._

_The desk was small, barely large enough to hold a copy-book on top of it. It was one of those redundant ones, the ones that attached to the metal-framed chairs._

_His chair squeaked whenever he shifted in it._

_The left back leg of it felt unstable. And the right front leg was a few centimetres shorter so the chair rocked and shook if he leaned too far forward or backward too quickly._

_"Hah?" The woman would not give up._

_Her jibes began fell on deaf ears as Guddu's world whited out around him._

_The sounds of the classroom rose to a deafening crescendo, getting louder and louder and growing increasingly difficult to decipher or understand._

_The teacher's fat, manicured hand reached out, touched his shoulder. Her nails dug in and she shook him once, hard._

_Guddu tore himself from her grasp like he'd been burned._

_Keeping his head low, he fled. Dodged the legs sticking out into the aisle, the taunts and hushed titters splashing his face scarlet in shame._

_The boys wouldn't leave him alone after that. The usual taunting he bore with a turned shoulder and disdainful silence. His hair was longer than any of the boys in his class and his body seemed to be developing a lot more slowly._

_All of the other boys were beginning to fill out around the chest. Many were sporting downy moustaches or darkened chins._

_But he was stuck looking like a girl because he was still thin and couldn't afford a haircut._

_They cornered him that day in the bathroom._

_In front of the grey-tinged sink and the cracked, badly-grouted tiled wall._

_"Naam kiya hai tera?"_

_("What's your name?") The ringleader of the group shoved him against the wall._

_Guddu stayed silent, his heart pounding in his chest._

_"Behre ho kiya?"_

_("You deaf or something?")_

_The boy grabbed Guddu's shoulders and slapped back into the wall again._

_His teeth were uneven and there was a dark green leaf stuck right in between his two front teeth._

_There were two other boys behind him. One had a turmeric stain on his white school shirt._ **_Haldi_ ** _. The other, standing to spinach-tooth's right had greasy, thin hair scrapes back in an attempt at a sleeck slick-back. Guddu could see the boy's scalp peeking out between the sticky locks of hair._

_"Naam kiya hai tera? Huh?"_

_("What's your name? Huh?")_

_His hands were crumpling the collar of Guddu's school shirt._

_"G-g-g-g-g-" He started and stopped, closing his mouth and swallowing._

_"G-g-g-" He stammered. It was still useless. He couldn't get through a sentence without the words skipping and jumping around in his mouth like a broken record._

_The bully laughed in his face. His eyes were wide and bugged out in glee._

_"P-p-p-p-p-p-l-l-e-e-ee-s-s-s." He felt something recoil inside in him in disgust. He was begging. Like a fool. Like a cowardly fool._

_Charlie would never have begged. He would have decked the kid one and beaten the shit out of all of them._

_But it didn't matter._

_Because Charlie wasn't here._

_Charlie was gone._

_Guddu struggled feebly, trying to twist his frame from his classmate's grasp._

_He just shifted his grip and pushed him up against the grimy wall harder._

_"Tera naam Guddu hai, na?"_

_("Your name's Guddu isn't it?")_

_"G-g-g-uddu?" He mocked, badly faking Guddu's stutter._

_The two boys behind him capered about, imitating what he assumed to be his terrified expression._

_He wasn't surprised._

_He looked around wildly, for a way out._

_And caught sight of himself in the specked and scratched bathroom mirror._

_His expression froze on his features._

_He looked pathetic._

_He stopped, staring back at himself. At his dark, frightened brown eyes._

_Unsurprisingly, he looked a lot like Charlie. Them being identical twins and all._

_"Ch-ch-"_

_The group'd raucous laughter filled his ears._

_"Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-o-d-d m-m-m-uj-j-j-he."_

_("L-l-l-l-l-l-l-e-t-t m-m-m-e g-g-go.")_

_It took him completely by surprise._

_A fist slammed into the right side of his face and drove the left side of his head into the wall. Black spots danced across his vision and the pain in his cheek and jaw rendered his speechless._

_His mouth fell open and he gasped, fiery pain lacing through both sides of his head._

_A knee to his stomach knocked the air from his lungs and he staggered, the only thing holding him up at that point was the pair of hands still gripping him firmly by the shirt._

_The sharp toe of a leather school toe clipped him in the ribs and slumped forward, his arms already up over his head._

_Another fist hit him square in the stomach and he hit the floor head on._

_**"Aaah!"** _ _He cried out at the heavy hit. The thick heel of someone's shoe had caught him square on the spine. His lower back arched backwards, the reflex followed by a crippling, wrenching of his muscles._

_Guddu felt sick._

_And just like that, he couldn't move. A few more hard kicks impacted his body, every single one striking bone and eliciting a higher cry from him before he heard a foot strike his head._

_And then it was all over._

_The last thing he thinks about is how Charlie won't be here to save him this time. His brother won't be here to shove the bullies aside, pick him up and wipe his nose like he always did._

_And that's his own fault._

Charlie is quieter than Guddu remembers. He used to talk a lot. Guddu even used to be jealous. Charlie might have sounded a bit funny, but he never wasted time on simple sentences like his brother did. His words were quick, to the point and always easy to decipher.

He wishes Charlie would talk more. 

When they were younger, Charlie used to talk for the both of them a lot.

They'd watch the trains go by after school and Charlie would tell Guddu everything. Guddu always wondered where he got such stories. They went to the same school and were in the exact same class.

Still, Charlie always had a lot to say.

He'd get Guddu to talk too. When they were alone. And soon Guddu discovered that he didn't stutter half as much when they were alone. He hardly noticed when he did, anyway. More often than not Charlie knew what he was going to say before he'd completed half his sentence.

_It took Charlie a long time to get over the shock of that day._

_It was like everything happened so fast, but at the same time not fast enough._

_The bills fluttered to the ground around him like a hundred dead butterflies. Guddu's face was painful to look at._

_Charlie's eyes lowered to the ground. He was silent. He just stared at the money he'd worked so hard for. All for nothing. He wished he could say something. Do something. He wished he could cry like his twin._

_Guddu's face was clenched up tight and tears were streaming down his face. He stifled a sob deep in his chest and Charlie visibly flinched._

_His face wouldn't mirror it's lookalike. It, like the rest of him, felt frozen. He couldn't move, couldn't lift his head, couldn't stand. He wanted to take his brother's hands. To protect him as he had always done. But he couldn't. He could feel pieces of himself crumbling to the ground. Like a derelict building finally tumbling down after years of punishment._

_And then, as his brother's footsteps grew farther and farther away, he collapsed conpletely._

_He had lost his brother._

_He had no one left._

He'd always been the tough one. The 'older' one. The one to tear and asshole a new one or cuss a blue streak at bully.

He'd always been a little too hard, easily balancing out his brother's soft and overly-forgiving disposition. Charlie rarely teased him about it, and when he did, he was careful to not upset his brother.

The truth was that he wished he could be the same.

Guddu wanted so much for people to be like him that, more often than not, he saw them that way. He would trust so easily. He would assume that other people cared just as much as he did. And when he made up excuses for people's bad behaviour, Charlie could see that he genuinely believed them to be possible.

He saw so much of the best on people that it made difficult for him to see the worst. Because he didn't want to.

_Charlie had never trusted people easily._

_He had fought his way through his adult life, tooth and nail for every scrap that he had. And that had only served to make him more closed off from the people around him. The walls he put up around him only got thicker and more impenetrable._

Charlie wrapped the towel around his waist and ran a comb hurriedly through his wet hair. It hung in his eyes, tickling them before he brushed it back, peering at his reflection in the foggy bathroom mirror.

He would have cut it long ago, but he and Guddu were still identical after all these years and, even if he hated to admit it to himself, he liked that. 

It had been the one part of his brother that he'd had to keep in all the years that they'd been apart. 

Telling them apart was easy enough: Guddu's  _masterji_  style _kurtas_ and clean shaven face were a far cry from Charlie's close-cropped goatee, tight T shirts and hunched, scowling shoulders. 

There were other ways to tell them apart. Although their frames and builds were almost identical, -Charlie had even joked about Guddu being the most buff _masterji_ he'd ever seen- their bodies couldn't be more different.

Charlie turned around, muscles rippling beneath his brown skin as he reached for the shorts hanging on the towel rack. 

He hung the towel up and stepped out of the bathroom, leaving the door open so Sophia wouldn't complain about a damp bathroom and steamy mirror. 

He opened the cupboard, pulling on a pair of jeans and buckling the belt.

Sophia came in, her bare feet padding across the smooth cement floor. She hugged him from behind, her arms snaking around his waist and he smiled, turning his head to kiss her cheek. 

 Her fingers traced one of the many scars slicing through his skin. This particular one was a stab wound in the left side of his stomach. It was one of the worst.

_Before joining Mikhail and his brothers, Charlie eeked out a living however he could. Illegal fights paid good money._

_People paid to watch others fight. He'd had to learn quickly, but he was big for a nineteen year old and used to scrapping in back alleys for the little money he had on him. Now he brought home seven to eight thousand rupees per fight._

_It came almost easily to him._

_He went up in the ranks, graduating from fights held on the streets to a ring organised by a gang. The fights got better and better and the bills he took home multiplied._

_He was a favourite by his twentieth birthday._

_And he made a big mistake._

_A fixer spoke to him after a win. Promising him double his usual win if he lost._

_Charlie accepted._

_But in the ring, he threw an uppercut. A little too hard._

_And his opponent crashed to the mat, out cold. Charlie stood there dumbly, watching him. There was nothing he could do; he'd just KO'd his meal ticket._

_They jumped him on his way home. After emptying his pockets and realising that he's stashed his win money somewhere else, the lost it. Kicking him to the ground, the group of ten started in on him with hockey sticks and cricket bats._

_Charlie curled up on the ground in the dark alley, jerking and yelling in pain. He very distinctly felt two of his ribs snap._

_Then he was on his back with someone leaning over him. It was dark and Charlie's vision was blurry, making the person's features unreadable._

_Charlie yelled when he felt the knife being plunged into his side, the sound stuttering off into a gurgle as blood filled his mouth._

_From there he slipped in and out of _conciousness_ , sometimes wondering whether he was going to die, or dreaming of a pair of hands smoothing the sweaty hair back from his forehead._

_Whose they were, he didn't know. His brother's? His father's? His mother's?_

_He tried to drag himself out of the alley and into the street, but all he managed to do was haul himself onto his stomach._

_He tried to maintain pressure on the wound his fingers felt so weak. He tried to call for help, but all that left his lips was a whisper._

 He hadn't died that night, but the scar was an ugly reminder that he could have. He could have died like a stray dog in some trash filled alleyway.a

If he had, he would never have felt his brother's arms around him, squeezing him tightly enough to crack one of his ribs.

If he had he never would have felt Sopiha's lips on his own. Her legs around his waist and her fingers in his hair.

But he preferred not to think about that.

Because, in some way, it was over now. Things were different somehow. 

 

 


End file.
